Pennsylvania puts Trump on the path to a win

Donald Trump is on the brink of the presidency, stomping across the electoral map with wins in the biggest battlegrounds of Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and now Pennsylvania.

The string of victories toppled the so-called blue wall of states that Hillary Clinton had supposedly constructed to keep the White House in Democratic hands — stunning the nation, the markets and the world.

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The Dow Futures sank as much as 750 points. The Mexico peso plunged. The confidence drained from the once-optimistic Clinton campaign, which went radio silent as the results rolled in. Trump’s team, meanwhile, began to gloat.

After midnight, Trump had amassed a lead of more than a million votes in the national popular vote.

Clinton’s path had narrowed to nearly nothing. She essentially needs to sweep the remaining states on the board: Michigan, Wisconsin and New Hampshire and a miracle in Arizona, where she is trailing.

Inside the Javits Center in Manhattan — the site of Clinton’s planned victory party — a mass of Democrats stood aghast on the convention center floor watching CNN and MSNBC on the massive screens hanging above the dozens of American flags.

After Trump scored Pennsylvania, Clinton’s campaign broke from precedent by not putting the candidate on stage, instead sending campaign chairman John Podesta to the Javits Center to greet the crowd.

“They’re still counting votes and every vote should count,” Podesta said to the remaining Democrats. "Good night, we will be back, we will have more to say. Let’s get these votes counted and let’s bring this home."

Across town, at the Trump party, the buzz was building. It exploded when Fox News declared Ohio for Trump, the first swing state to fall. “USA!” came the chants from the crowd.

"This is a movement. It's more than a normal political election," said Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Alabama Republican who was the first GOP senator to endorse Trump in late February. "It transcends normal party politics."

“It’s gone from despair to hope,” said Hogan Gidley, who worked on a pro-Trump super PAC.

Trump and Clinton scored victories in predictable places — Trump in conservative corners, Clinton in liberal bastions. Trump also picked up a victory in Iowa, where President Barack Obama had won twice.

Trump was making deep incursions into traditional Democratic territory. In Mahoning County in Ohio, for instance, which President Obama carried with 63.2 percent, Clinton was hovering at only 50 percent. He had sliced deeply into formerly large Democratic margins in parts of New Hampshire, which was still too close to call.

Both sides appeared to be driving record-setting turnout. It’s just that Trump’s surge was larger.

In Florida, Clinton had tallied more than 620,000 votes in the Democratic stronghold of Florida’s Miami-Dade County — a whopping 10 percent more than Obama did four years ago.

But Trump pushed his margins more in other regions of the state to capture the single largest trove of Electoral College votes available.

One thing was clear from early exit polls — the divisive contest, pitting the former secretary of state and first lady against the billionaire businessman — had left many Americans deeply unsatisfied with their choice.

Those exit polls had seemed to offer some early warning signs for Trump’s supporters, none more so than the fact that more than three in five of those interviewed viewed him unfavorably. Clinton fared slightly better, with a disapproval rating of 54 percent.

The exit poll, conducted by a consortium of news organizations, also showed Clinton and Trump virtually tied among white voters with a college degree — a demographic that has gone Republican for a half-century. But Trump led Clinton 65 percent to 29 percent among whites without college degrees — a bigger margin that Mitt Romney carried that group four years ago.

Trump’s strong showing was lifting Republicans down the ballot. In the Senate, Republicans scored a string of big victories. Sen. Marco Rubio won reelection in Florida, as did Sen. Ron Johnson in Wisconsin and Sen. Richard Burr in North Carolina, while the GOP also knocked back Democratic former Sen. Evan Bayh in Indiana. The only early loss was in Illinois, where Democratic Rep. Tammy Duckworth knocked off the incumbent.

Heading into the election, Clinton had led in most national polls, and in enough battleground states to reach the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House.

Buoyed by his energetic crowds, Trump dismissed those findings. “I think a lot of the polls are phony,” Trump said Tuesday.

As the polls began closing, there were two key tranches of states that both Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters and Trump Tower were monitoring most closely on Tuesday night.

The first — Ohio, Florida and North Carolina — are worth a combined 62 electoral votes and all three are within the margin of error in polls.

Trump swept all three.

The second set were Democratic-leaning states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Nevada, Wisconsin and Minnesota — that Trump would need to pick off some combination of in order to win.

Trump was leading in Wisconsin and Michigan. New Hampshire was knotted.

The five months of the Clinton-Trump contest had been a must-see spectacle for the nation, gripping the public consciousness and drawing record viewership to their three debates.

Trump battled back accusations of sexual assault in the final month, after a tape emerged of him bragging about groping women in early October. In characteristic style, he lashed out as his accusers — threatening to sue them in a speech at Gettysburg — as Clinton called him “temperamentally unfit” for the presidency.

But Clinton confronted 18 months of questions about her use of a private-email server at the State Department, including an FBI investigation that seemingly concluded in July — only to reemerge with 11 days left in the campaign.

She was eventually cleared — again — of criminal wrongdoing only two days before the election. Trump cried foul about a “rigged system” tilted against his outsider candidacy.